It’s officially on! SB 5 will be on a refendum ballot this November!

Earlier today, Secretary of State Jon Husted informed the “We Are Ohio” campaign that his office has officially certified that they collected the sufficient number of valid signatures to place SB 5 on a repeal ballot this November.

And here’s a chart from Husted’s office showing a county by county breakdown. In order to get it on the ballot they had to get over 231,150 signatures with the signatures coming from the equivalent of at least 3% of the votes cast in the 2010 gubernatorial election in half of Ohio’s counties.

The We Are Ohio campaign hit the 3% (and then some) in EVERY county. Roughly more than 69% of the signatures submitted by “We Are Ohio” were validated. (915,456 out of 1,320,417.) In other words, nearly FOUR TIMES as many signatures they got. In fact, to give you a sense of just how many signatures they had, the number of invalid signatures was more than they needed. And although they technically had 90 days to get the signatures, the reality is that the actual signature gathering process didn’t start in earnest into a month after John Kasich signed SB 5.

Now the fun begins- first with the Ballot commission. Will it fudge the ballot language to make a “No” vote to mean support for SB 5? Second, how much will the Right pour into media ads after Labor Day? We have to be ready to counter and then some. We cannot go quiet after Sept and not respond or we risk losing…Jim, Columbus

There’s no doubt that this will be voted down. Question is do you want to keep doing this year after year until the end of his term? I hope no one thinks that he’s just going to say (Oh well I tried.) As long as he is in office he will try to get this or some variation of it passed. We need to come together one more time this year to Recall him this year so that we don’t have to keep doing it year after year! Recall Kasich Rally August 6, 2011, State House Lawn, 2:30 p.m.